Baby name remorse II: Common regrets and fixes

Earlier this week we wrote an article about a couple that changed their baby’s name 5 times. While that may be a record, we have found that it isn’t at all uncommon for parents to regret their baby name choice… but most learn to live with it.

Nonetheless, we think its worth warning you new and expecting parents out there of some common pitfalls when choosing that “special” name!

Alesandra Dubin is a writer for Today.com and put together a few of the top things that people wish they knew before naming their baby. At #1 she has:

1.The name is super popular.

“ I had only heard of a couple people with my daughter’s name, prior to naming her,” mom Mari Carmen Vega wrote on our Facebook page. “Now, it feels like I hear her name everywhere!” It’s a common complaint — you’ve never heard the name Isabella, or Aiden, until you give it to your baby… and suddenly it’s shooting up the charts. If you’d hoped to give your child a unique name, a sudden surge of popularity can cause some name regret.

Solution: You can look at our articles on popular baby names and quickly see that these “unique” names are the flavors of the year.

2.Family will learn to love it.

You may get major push-back if you float ideas out loud. But the reality is that after that precious baby comes, you’ll find that people suddenly adore a name they hated when it was merely a hypothetical suggestion — now that it belongs to a real-world, cherubic little human. “We hear parents say they wish they’d known that grandma and grandpa often learn to love names they’d objected to during the pregnancy,” said Nameberry co-founder Pamela Redmond Satran.

Of course they had to throw in a Kardashian reference. Note, edited out here to preserve brain cells.

3.Some people just won’t get it.

Some parents-to-be choose to keep picks totally private until delivery. But a focus group of trusted friends — or even strangers — can help anticipate and avoid issues like pronunciation or spelling confusion.

4.Most name associations don’t last.

When choosing our babies’ names, it’s hard not to conjure every personal reference from our lives: that childhood friend who once insulted us in homeroom, that mean first boss, that college girlfriend of our partner. But that kind of process of elimination ends up eliminating, well, everything.

Obviously the suggestion here is to keep an open mind and not let unpleasant memories get in the way. But ladies, I will suggest staying away from the name of that past “man that got away”. This will bite you in the *** someday.

5.Pop culture can change everything.

Let’s say you’ve selected the perfect name… but a few years later a celeb pops up on the scene with the same one — and it connotes a certain image or notoriety you’d rather not have associated with your kid. Or even more benignly, the celeb association may cause the popularity of the name to skyrocket — a phenomenon Terresa Smith described on our Facebook page.

Our writer took this opportunity to throw in yet another reference to an above mentioned family of pseudo celebrities to make the point, “Can predict the future. Live with it”.

6.The name might not suit the kid’s personality.

Practically speaking, it makes a lot of sense to name your baby before you leave the hospital — trying to manage all that paperwork retroactively can be a major hassle. But by then, you might not have a true sense of your kid’s personality, and you might assign a name that doesn’t quite feel like a match down the road. One approach? Stick to your best instinct off the bat, which mom Sarah Granger-Twomey wishes she’d done. She said, “For our daughter’s middle name, I wish we would have stuck to our creative guns and chosen Rain instead of gone with the traditional family name Anne. It’s much too formal for my little whirling dervish.”

7.The name doesn’t lend itself to nicknames.

This is an issue you can ponder in advance by researching and tossing around potential nicknames for a pick you love. If you can’t find one that fits, it might be a dealbreaker. As Missy Mercurio Haney wrote on our Facebook page, “I love my Morgan, but there is no good nickname for that name! My brother in law calls her Morgie, which I think sounds morbid. We do call her Moo… but probably won’t call her that around her friends or in public, though.”

There were were two other suggestions and several more celeb name-drops, but we didn’t find them worthy of bringing aboard. But, please drop by Today.com to leave comments and show appreciation for the article.

We’ll close this article with what is hopefully a bit of relief to this anxiety producing situation:

Changing your baby’s name is really easy

Clearly, you can call the little tike anything you like and many people end up with these nicknames with most people never even knowing their real names. However, legally changing your baby’s name is usually know more difficult than going online to your state’s website and filling out an application and paying the $20 or so. Each state’s cost and procedure does vary slightly.